Studio: international art (47.1909)

Recent Designs in Domestic Architecture

“fEMME NUE” (ETCHING) BY J. L. FORAIN

balancing his blacks against his whites, as in his
Prodigal Son plates (pp. 193, 197). The majority
of the plates display a certain super-nervousness of
line. They look as if the rapidity of execution had
been immense. I imagine that when Forain does
eventually come to elaborate his own proper style,
which, as this diversity of attempts shows, he has
not yet attained, it will be
this nervous line that he
will cultivate and probably
temper, for it seems to me
to lack simplicity, occa-
sionally, at present.

For the present, how-
ever, his attentions are not
directed that way; they
are rather engrossed by the
same pursuit after mastery
of expression. And they are
full of superb instances of
such mastery having been
compassed, as even our
reduced illustrations will
show. One of his favourite
topics, the same that he
has discussed already time
and again in drawings for
the magazines, are scenes

at the law courts. The plate of the Tenioins
au Pretoire (p. 190) is replete with the finest obser-
vation. The old woman has the harassed look
of one who has given evidence against kith and
kin. There is a marvellous twinge of inborn
coquetry in the furtive glance that the little girl
shoots at us, and the boy in his look of surprise
mingled with self-consciousness has plainly for
the first time in his life been hoisted to a
position of importance, which, however small it
may have been, was still in no wise the result
of his own deserts. Le Prisonnier et son Enfant
is perhaps the finest of all the plates. The
besotted expression of the prisoner, debased and
corrupted from birth, a true specimen of a
degenerated race, surpasses anything of the kind
I have seen. The presentation of his little child
by its young mother is a most powerful moment
in the com'edie humaine, at a moment where that
comedie becomes singularly tragic. H. W. S.

R

ECENT DESIGNS IN DOMES-
TIC ARCHITECTURE.

The illustrations which have ap-
peared under this heading in our recent issues
have almost without exception been those of
English houses; but on this occasion, by way of
variation, we give some examples of houses and
interiors designed by a firm of German architects,
Messrs. Runge and Scotland, of Bremen, whom
many of our readers may remember as the
designers of some luxurious cabins on the North

DR. VASSMER’S COUNTRY HOUSE : GARDEN VIEW

RUNGE & SCOTLAND, ARCHITECTS, BREMEN